Book Image

Microservices Communication in .NET Using gRPC

By : Fiodar Sazanavets
Book Image

Microservices Communication in .NET Using gRPC

By: Fiodar Sazanavets

Overview of this book

Explore gRPC's capabilities for faster communication between your microservices using the HTTP/2 protocol in this practical guide that shows you how to implement gRPC on the .NET platform. gRPC is one of the most efficient protocols for communication between microservices that is also relatively easy to implement. However, its official documentation is often fragmented and.NET developers might find it difficult to recognize the best way to map between C# data types and fields in gRPC messages. This book will address these concerns and much more. Starting with the fundamentals of gRPC, you'll discover how to use it inside .NET apps. You’ll explore best practices for performance and focus on scaling a gRPC app. Once you're familiar with the inner workings of the different call types that gRPC supports, you'll advance to learning how to secure your gRPC endpoints by applying authentication and authorization. With detailed explanations, this gRPC .NET book will show you how the Protobuf protocol allows you to send messages efficiently by including only the necessary data. You'll never get confused again while translating between C# data types and the ones available in Protobuf. By the end of the book, you’ll have gained practical gRPC knowledge and be able to use it in .NET apps to enable direct communication between microservices.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
1
Section 1: Basics of gRPC on .NET
5
Section 2: Best Practices of Using gRPC
9
Section 3: In-Depth Look at gRPC on .NET

Chapter 8: Using Well-Known Types to Make Protobuf More Handy

We learned in Chapter 3, Protobuf – the Communication Protocol of gRPC, that data types that are native to Protobuf cannot be null and must have the default value. The default value will be applied if you don't explicitly set the value in the code. For example, the default value for the string data type is an empty string value. The default value for any of the integer data types is 0. The default value for bool is false.

This presents a problem. Sometimes, you will be in a situation where you will need to distinguish between a value that has been deliberately set and a value that was automatically set to the default. For example, the count of 0 has a different meaning than "no data." Likewise, Boolean false has a very different meaning from "no answer has been given."

Luckily, there is a neat solution to this problem. Protobuf has access to a library of so-called "well-known types...